THE Friday Boys are a disparate group of men spread across Tyneside who meet once a week - 'always on a Friday' - to talk about the arts, raise a glass to recently departed heroes and villains and, at the evening's end, down a whisky or two. The FBs have only one golden rule - talk of the working week is strictly off-limit.

Tuesday, 29 September 2009

The rather conservative Victorian clergyman who received the letters must have been a little shocked: there are details of a squalid affair with a serving girl, fruity remarks about foreigners and literary vitriol.

Then again, maybe not. The sender was, after all, Lord Byron. The superstar Romantic poet's reputation for witty excess is affirmed by the sexual revelations, jibes about the Portuguese ("few vices except lice and sodomy") and barbed comments about his rival Wordsworth ("Turdsworth").

Sotheby's is to auction the most important series of Byron letters to come to the market in more than 30 years, some of them unpublished. They were purchased by a former prime minister, the Earl of Rosebery, in 1885 and have remained with the family ever since.

The letters shed fascinating light on one of literature's most charismatic figures, a man accurately described by his lover Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad and dangerous to know". The Rosebery letters – all sent to his close friend Francis Hodgson – do not disappoint.

Sotheby's specialist Gabriel Heaton said: "Byron clearly enjoyed writing slightly outrageous things to a clergyman, but you do also get a very strong sense of the depth of friendship they had. There's a real intimacy."

About 15% of the letters' content is unpublished and unstudied. It includes references to Byron's affair with a serving girl, Susan Vaughan, that he ends when he hears she has been seeing someone else.

Heaton said: "Basically, he takes her as his mistress and he is never at any point saying he is going to be faithful to her but he expects her to be faithful to him and when he hears rumours that she isn't, she loses her job."

In another letter Byron talks about his time in Albania and Ali Pasha, the ruler, who impressed him as a "fine portly person with two hundred women and as many boys, many of the last I saw and very pretty creatures they were."

There is also much literary gossip and bitchiness. Byron and other leading poets of the time, such as Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, may have all been Romantics, but they were not friends. In the final letter he writes angrily about the denigration of a poet he much admired, Alexander Pope, by Southey and Wordsworth – or as he writes in the letter: "Southey and Turdsworth such renegado rascals."http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/27/lord-byron-letters-sothebys-auction

Jack Kirby, the abandoned hero of Marvel's grand Hollywood adventure, and his family's questSeptember 25, 2009 8:00 amThis is a longer version of my story that will run Sunday in the Los Angeles Times Calendar section...

You’d be hard-pressed to find a recent comic book that didn’t have the stylish scrawl of the artists somewhere on the cover, but that was not the case when Jack Kirby was making pop culture history back in the 1960s with his wildly kinetic drawings of the X-Men, Hulk and the Fantastic Four.“I think I have a highly unique and unusual style, and that’s the reason I never sign my drawings,” the proud Kirby told an interviewer in 1987, seven years before his death. “Everybody could tell any of my covers a mile away on the newsstand, and that satisfied me.”

The satisfaction was fleeting. The artist may be reverently referred to as “King” Kirby by the pop scholars and younger artists who celebrate his genre-defining work but Kirby is, in some ways, an overlooked figure in the broader view of American culture. He didn’t live to see his creations fly across the movie screen over the last decade and his four children made nothing from those lucrative films, although they are now pursuing legal action to claim some of the future Hollywood wealth. “There is,” daughter Lisa Kirby says, “a bittersweet legacy to my father’s work.”

On a recent afternoon, in Beverly Hills, a different man was autographing a giant lithograph reproducing one of Kirby’s classic Fantastic Four covers. It was Stan Lee, the writer who was Kirby’s most famous collaborator until they became estranged over creative credit, artwork custody and money. An art dealer had brought stacks of limited-edition lithos, some to be priced at $850, to Lee’s Santa Monica Boulevard office along with a check in his pocket to pay the 86-year-old Lee for his autographs.

Lee had written the stories for the classic comics, of course, but considering all the history, it was still odd to see his name etched on the cosmic Kirby tableau from 1966.

“Yes, there was a time when there was some hard feeling on his part, but he got over that and we were friends,” Lee said. “It really is sad that he didn’t get to see all the big movies. None of us could predict that we would get to this point with the films. I don’t dwell on it too much because I’m always so busy doing what I am doing today. Unfortunately the guys back in the day did not make as much as they do today. Years ago also you had artists doing these comics who, well, there was nothing else they could have done. Their style wasn’t right for advertising or magazines like Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s. And as for us writers, well, we weren’t qualified to write for the New Yorker. Comic book writers were considered hacks, and artists weren’t really thought of as much beyond that.”

Lee studied one of the other art pieces, a dazzling revisiting of a Kirby cover for Captain America. "Wow, look at this one." The pieces are being sold by the Santa Monica gallery called Every Picture Tells a Story as part of a new licensing deal with Marvel to create high-end wall art from illustrations that were, in their day, the most gaudy and disposable entertainment imaginable. “As far as I’m concerned,” Lee said with his endless zeal, “it is fine art."

The story of two “hacks,” as Lee would frame it, will be scrutinized much more considering recent events. Last month, the Walt Disney Co. paid $4 billion to scoop up Marvel Entertainment and its vault of florid characters who over the last decade have become Hollywood box-office heroes. Many of the most valuable properties in that vault were created by the wildly prolific tandem of Lee and Kirby in the 1960s; there are two big-budget movies now in the pipeline for Marvel Studios that are based on Lee-Kirby creations (“The Mighty Thor" and “The Avengers”) and a third (“First Avenger: Captain America”) based on the work of Kirby and writer Joe Simon. The Kirby brood watched the Disney deal happen and within days were conferring with attorneys and accelerating their bid to reclaim copyright.

A day after Lee sat signing that artwork, attorneys representing the four children of Kirby sent out 45 notices of termination to Hollywood studios and players with an interest in assorted Marvel films; it was the opening salvo in a legal battle to gain copyright control of certain characters and the name on the legal letterhead was Toberoff & Associates, the same firm that last year won a intriguing victory by reclaiming a share of the copyright for the first Superman story for heirs of that character's co-creator, Jerry Siegel.

Under copyright law, creators or their heirs can seek to regain copyrights they previously assigned to a company 56 years after first publication, so the Kirby family is starting that process now with hopes of gaining an interest or, perhaps, a settlement. Lee, meanwhile, struck assorted deals through the years with Marvel and has been an executive producer on every Marvel film made to date, movies with worldwide box office now in the billions of dollars, and has had prominent cameos in many of them.

Lee is by far the most famous creator in comics history thanks to his longevity, success and a Barnum-like flair for self-promotion. He became a media figure in the 1960s when journalists jotted down his dizzying hyperbole about Marvel’s brightly hued, counterculture ethos. Kirby, laboring at home with far less credit, looked on and chafed about his status as a freelancer, essentially working for Lee, whose family connections by then had taken him to the top of the small and scruffy publishing venture. By 1970, Kirby had had enough and defected to rival DC Comics. Lee would go on to accumulate considerable wealth and fame, sometimes selling comics, sometimes selling his own persona with a long list of splashy but short-lived ventures. Kirby’s fortunes were not as grand; when he talked about his old creations he had the weary tone of a man who long ago watched the family coin collection scatter on a crowded street.

Lee knows that fans like to set up the partners as rivals. Kirby is portrayed as the irascible purist with staggering imagination and Lee reduced to the tireless huckster -- the pop-culture prophet versus the corporate profiteer. From Lee's present vantage point, though, he prefers to look back on their shared tale as the unexpected odyssey of two kids who grew up in a business of cruel deadlines and lowbrow aspirations and found in each other a go-to guy.

“My favorite thing about Kirby’s artwork was his storytelling,” Lee said. “He was really a film director doing comics.”

In that, Kirby was certainly ahead of his time. Comics are a huge part of Hollywood now, thanks to the modern era of computer-generated special effects that, finally, can match the galactic visions and super-powered mayhem that Kirby put to paper in the 1960s. Kirby’s influence is nothing less than massive on several generations of artists and filmmakers.

“There was power in the work of Jack Kirby that changed the way I looked at things,” said Guillermo del Toro, writer-director of “Pan’s Labyrinth.” "There was no one else like him and there never will be."

Nevertheless, Kirby remains a distant second to Lee in name recognition, which Lisa Kirby said rankles. “A lot more people know the name Stan Lee than the name Jack Kirby,” she said. “I’m not putting down Stan Lee’s talents but it’s difficult for us to see that he does dominate the credit. That doesn’t reflect the work or the reality. To see Jack Kirby in small letters and Stan Lee in big letters, that’s hard for us.”

Mike Richardson grew up under the thrall of Kirby's drawings and was inspired to found his own comic-book company, Dark Horse, which has grown into a Hollywood player after seeing titles such as "The Mask," "Hellboy" and "300" jump to the screen. Through the years, he reached out to the Kirby family to help them find some sort of compensation.

"There was a lot of anger in the Kirby family with the way that Jack was treated, more than they will express in public," Richardson said. "There's no way you can say enough about the impact of those Marvel comics in the 1960s. They changed the rules. Lee and Kirby were the Lennon and McCartney of comics and Stan Lee became a well-known figure in popular culture and Jack did not. Neither were as great on their own, it's true, but Jack had decades of work that was really special. To me, there's no doubt that Jack Kirby was the truly brilliant creative genius behind the success of Marvel."

If there’s a battle to come, it’s one Kirby never took on in life.

“Jack didn’t have the resources or the stomach lining to fight Marvel over copyrights, character ownership or past contractual sleights that he believed he suffered,” says Mark Evanier, who was Kirby’s assistant in the early 1970s and later his biographer. “He fought to get back his pages of original art. That was the fight he believed he could win.”

Evanier, now a comics historian and creator, testified in the Siegel suit and it seems certain that he would be in the deposition seat for any Kirby legal case. A longtime friend to Kirby and respectful acquaintance of Lee, he spoke glowingly of the partnership as lightning in a bottle, the zenith of each man’s career.

Kirby contributed mightily to the plots and character creation; the workload at Marvel was so intense in the 1960s that there were no “scripts” handed to Kirby, he would just draw the story and Lee would go back and craft dialogue that fit the action. Still, Evanier said, while it’s now fashionable to view Lee as the lesser figure, he also had the separate success of Spider-Man (with artist Steve Ditko) and set the singular tone and culture of Marvel.

The pair had met in the Roosevelt years. In late 1940, Jacob Kurtzberg, 23, drawing under the name Kirby, had his first taste of real success in the young comics industry, which soared after the debut of Superman in 1938. Kirby and writer Simon’s Captain America was a hit for Timely Comics, which would later morph into Marvel. There was an eager assistant in the office named Stanley Lieber, just 18, who had gotten the job through a family connection (and would later shorten his name).

“In those days they dipped the pen in ink, I had to make sure the inkwells were filled,” said Lee. “I went down and got them their lunch, I did proofreading, I erased the pencils from the finished pages for them.

Whatever had to be done. I remember Jack would always be sitting at a table puffing on his cigar, kind of talking to himself as he was doing those pages.”

Lee’s first credited work was a 1941 Captain America story where the hero threw his shield for the first time. That would become a trademark for decades, suggesting an instant flair for the medium. Kirby left Timely not long after. Years later, with comics in the doldrums, Lee and Kirby would reunite and create a new sort of comic book, with frenetic energy, mutant outsiders and misunderstood monsters. Superman and DC Comics instantly seemed like boring old Pat Boone; Marvel felt like the Beatles and the British Invasion. It was Kirby’s artwork with its tension and psychedelia that made it perfect for the times — or was it Lee’s bravado and melodrama, which was somehow insecure and brash at the same time?

“Jack was the best partner you could ask for, dependable and imaginative,” Lee said, sitting in an office cluttered with all those old heroes and villains. “And it was never dull. Nothing with us was ever dull.”

A shaven-headed Einstein mistakes Sol Campbell for supermodel Naomi in the lower divisions of the English Football League where it has been found that many players are incapable of distinguishing between men and women

Last night - in the dead of night - Da played an astonishing final gig at The Egypt Cottage. With three musical expeditionaries he forced opened a door at the now derelict boozer and, by candlelight, played three songs of plaintive beauty.Set List:I Don't Stand (A Ghost of a Chance)Desolation RowJake the Peg

The award winning writer began his career at the BBC in 1958 and wrote several plays for the broadcaster before creating his first series, Storyboard, in 1961. His most famous TV creation was Liverpool-based police drama Z-Cars, which ran for 15 years although he was only involved in the first two series.

He moved into feature films in the early 1970s with the original screenplay for Peter Collinson’s The Italian Job, which starred Noel Coward and Michael Caine. He followed it up with Kelly’s Heroes, The Jerusalem File and Sweeney 2, based on the popular TV series, The Sweeney, created by his brother Ian Kennedy Martin. He also co-wrote the screenplay for Red Heat with director Walter Hill in 1988 and Red Dust, directed by Tom Hooper, in 2004.

He returned to TV work during the 1980s, including the critically acclaimed political thriller/science fiction drama Edge Of Darkness, and the popular ITV drama Reilly, Ace Of Spies. He also adapted Andy McNab’s book Bravo Two Zero for the BBC.

Although he was best known for his work spanning TV and film, he also penned a novel, Beating The Damask Drum, published in 1959, and gave many lectures including the McTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International TV Festival in 1986.

Saturday, 19 September 2009

Grahame came into his movie night with a perfect reputation after his impeccable first effort hit all the right notes with all the FBs. His second choice was less well-received despite containing the most erotic scene in the history of cinema. Nevertheless, a brave choice.

Friday, 18 September 2009

"Watch the skies everywhere! Keep looking! Keep watching the skies!"The Thing from Another World was released in 1951 and was a smash hit, playing on fears generated by the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s possession of the atom bomb, a populist antipathy towards science in the nuclear age and the UFO flap in 1947 starting with Kenneth Arnold’s sighting at Mount Rainier, Washington and the ‘incident’ at Roswell, New Mexico.

Set in an Arctic research station, the film tells the story of a group of American Air Force personnel and scientists who investigate a crashed UFO buried under the ice. Attempting to free it, they accidentally blow up the craft but retrieve the pilot frozen in a block of ice. When the body is taken to headquarters, it is inadvertently thawed out and it attacks the guard before escaping.

The military, led by Air Force Captain Patrick Hendry (Kenneth Tobey), decide to destroy the creature, but the science community led by Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) feel it is a living member of the carrot family that subsists on blood. Carrington uses the alien’s arm, torn off when it attacked the sled dogs, to grow alien plant buds, but after it has attacked again, female scientist Nikki (Margaret Sheridan) suggests they ‘boil’ it. Although Carrington wants to communicate and reason with the creature, the military, with the help of the other scientists, rig up a method of passing electricity through it and boiling it away to nothing.

Officially credited to Christian Nyby, this sci-fi/horror movie is thought to be the work of Howard Hawks. Nyby had been Hawks’ editor on Red River and when the latter refused to re-edit Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw, Nyby had stepped in. Hawks’ company, Winchester Pictures, produced The Thing and allegedly, Hawks gave Nyby the directorial credit for this past favour; indeed, existing production stills indicate Hawks is in charge of the actors. Nyby’s future career also raises questions about his role: the movie was a critical and commercial hit, but it was five years before he directed his next one, Hell on Devil’s Island and none of his later works come close to the quality of The Thing. Hawks was also involved in the script: while credited to Charles Lederer, it is known that it underwent re-writes by Hawks and Ben Hecht.

People familiar with Hawks’ films will recognise various aspects of his style, particularly the pacing, overlapping dialogue, humour,a concentration on a group of people working together calmly under considerable pressure and the female character who finds her place in the group.

Although Kenneth Tobey is the star, it’s more of an ensemble piece and the other actors, most of who would only ever be seen in supporting roles, are excellent, particularly at conveying a sense of actually listening when the dialogue overlaps and not just waiting for their turn to talk. Their naturalistic manners and light humour help create a feeling of grace under pressure while reflecting the sense of camaraderie that unites the characters. Nikki is a typically assertive Hawks woman who skilfully spars verbally with Hendry, jokes with him like his male colleagues and proves her worth by suggesting the way to kill the creature. At one point, in a scene reminiscent of the one in The Big Sleep where Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) puts a cigarette in the lips of the tied-up Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart), she ties his hands behind his back, as if indulging in some kind of fetishistic foreplay as she feeds him drinks before kissing him once he is passive.

The source for the film is a short story, Who Goes There?, by John W. Campbell, Jr., first published under his pseudonym, Don A. Stuart; unlike the movie monster, however, Campbell’s alien had the ability to shape-shift – something that is picked up in John Carpenter’s remake, The Thing (1982) – and the soldiers begin to suspect each other of being the creature. To reflect the themes evident in his other films, Hawks and Ben Hecht took Charles Lederer’s script and fashioned a work that dealt more with the dynamics of the group under pressure, as exemplified by the shot of them joining hands in a circle on the ice to show the circumference and size of the UFO and the various group shots inside the base, including one that involves 17 characters interacting.

For the exterior shots before the alien ship is discovered, Hawks shot in North Dakota in winter when the plane lands, but the scene with the craft was shot in fake snow and ice and with a fake sky backdrop; in fact, the same piece of sky can be seen in several shots regardless of the situation of the cameras. However, when the craft is destroyed, the camera pans up, following the smoke and travels- rather obviously, unfortunately - beyond the sky backdrop onto the real sky!

The Thing from Another World is one of the first big science-fiction films of the 1950s and unlike many later efforts, does not rely heavily on special effects. Even though the characters and the audience are aware of the size of the space ship, it is not seen; the monster (James Arness, later of Gunsmoke fame) is only glimpsed in shadows and on his first full appearance, a matte is used to obscure his face. In fact, to help create suspense, the original poster does not feature the alien at all, but rather the title as if burned into some object, and several wires as if hinting, in a rather obtuse fashion, at the ending of the movie.

From the open spaces of the arctic seen in the early sequences, the action shifts to the enclosed environment of the base, where a raging snow storm serves to reinforce the notion that the characters are trapped. Adding to the suspense is Dimitri Tiomkin’s score, using a theremin to accentuate the shocks; for example, when the men find the monster’s arm after it has been ripped off by the dogs. However, rather than increase the pace of the editing to engender a sense of action and panic, Hawks relies more on having the characters talk more briskly, as if they are in control but hurrying to get the job done. In the final encpunter, they are cornered in the dark, waiting for the alien, yet he is in their trap.

Eventually, the scientists and the airmen make their stand in the generator room and construct a trap using high voltage electricity on overhead leads as a weapon. Carrington attempts to stop them, first by closing down the power on the base and then by trying to reason with the creature, but he is brushed aside before the others pass electrical current through it, shrivelling it down to nothing.

The film can be read as a Cold War parable with the men fighting a single-minded entity with no sense of morality, bent on destruction in an suitably icy environment: the journalist, Scotty, exhorts people to “Watch the skies” – presumably for invading Soviet aircraft - while Hendry fears the Russians may well be “all over the pole like flies” and has to deal with Carrington, a McCarthy-era “enemy within”, who, like contemporary liberals, wants to talk to the enemy and tries to deceive the military men.

A typical concern of the science fiction films in the 1950s is the conflict between the military and the scientists. Carrington thinks the alien is an intelligent, superior being, not led by emotion and his intellectual concerns subsume rational sensibility, but in keeping with the Hawks admiration for the group under pressure, there is no choice: its survival is paramount and the other scientists try to persuade him that he is wrong.

However, this is not as straightforward as it seems. That Carrington is prepared to sacrifice anything to pursue scientific knowledge reflects another key theme – the mistrust of science in the atomic age. Early in the film, it is noted that Carrington was at Bikini Atoll where atomic tests were carried out and when he refers to the atomic bomb as an example of scientific progress, one soldier retorts, “That sure made everybody happy.”

More than this, there is a traditional American dislike of the elite, whether this is Carrington, who with his trimmed facial hair and the smart manner in which he dresses, physically stands apart from everyone on the base, including the other scientists who help the soldiers, or the military commander, General Fogarty, who is physically, emotionally and intellectually distant and advises Hendry to do as Carrington wishes.

It may be that in the end it is American servicemen and sensible scientists who win the day, but ultimately, for a ‘conservative’ film, it is only because the group, both soldiers and scientists, pull together and act as one in their common interest that they are able to defeat the Thing and when they do so, they employ scientific methods to finally kill it. Furthermore, although Carrington has put everyone’s life on the line, he is readmitted into the Hawksian group and Scotty is praised by one of the airmen for noting that he is making a recovery from “injuries sustained in the battle."